Residential Architect Design Awards

Printing House, New York

Adaptive Reuse / Citation

Spurred by the rising market for luxury housing in Lower Manhattan, the architects transformed the Printing House—an iconic industrial building in the West Village—from cramped loft apartments created in the 1970s into a hip new address. The change of attitude emerges in the sleek steel canopy added at the building entrance and continues into the lobby, where white surfaces play as a neutral foil to a glazed, green tile vault that survives from the building’s original 1911 construction. The team’s texture-rich approach to the revamp of the building comes to bear in the laser-cut, blackened steel panels used in the lobby redesign. But the main challenge was solving the puzzle of converting the 100 available units scattered throughout the building into 64 new residences—all with double-height living rooms and large-scale windows that fill the spaces with natural light. The new units preserve the concept of bedroom lofts introduced in the ’70s, while improving light distribution deep into spaces, which are outfitted with modern amenities. “For me, the appeal is less about the specific unit design and more about the quiet sophistication of the common areas,” juror Josh Shelton said. “I like the way all that works together as a color palette and material palette.”

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